Transversal: Poems (Camino del Sol)

by Urayoán Noel

Transversal takes a  disruptive approach to poetic translation, opening up alternative ways of reading as poems get translated or transcreated into entirely new pieces. In this collection, Urayoán Noel masterfully examines his native Puerto Rico and the broader Caribbean as sites of transversal poetics and politics.

Featuring Noel’s bilingual playfulness, intellect, and irreverent political imagination, Transversal contains personal reflections on love, desire, and loss filtered through a queer approach to form, expanding upon Noel’s experiments with self-translation in his celebrated collection Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico. This collection explores walking poems improvised on a smartphone, as well as remixed classical and experimental forms. Poems are presented in interlocking bilingual versions that complicate the relationship between translation and original, and between English and Spanish as languages of empire and popular struggle. The book creatively examines translation and its simultaneous urgency and impossibility in a time of global crisis.

Transversal seeks to disrupt standard English and Spanish, and it celebrates the nonequivalence between languages. Inspired by Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the collection celebrates Caribbean practices of creolization as maximalist, people-centered, affect-loaded responses to the top-down violence of austerity politics. This groundbreaking, modular approach to poetic translation opens up alternative ways of reading in any language.

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

First published March 16, 2021

Reviews

[L Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like Goodreads perhaps isn't the place where people go for their poetry reviews, but I don't have any other platform and I feel like I need to make a case for this book.

It is so far beyond any other poetry I've read this year. It is the work of a mad scientist whose subject is language. It is a playground. It is a shockingly pleasant cacophony.

Do yourself and your brain a favor and enter the world of Transversal. Here you will behold the Puerto Rican diaspora, the Bronx, and even Covid-19 in ways you never even thought of thinking about.

Although the text is in both English and Spanish, you do not need to know Spanish to read and understand it (case study: me).

[Caroline Ashworth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection was not for me. It hurt my brain to read it (especially the poems that intertwined the English and Spanish in the same paragraphs). Some of the poems were cool and I liked the overall message but I did not enjoy actually reading it.

[Camille Dungy]

That I am writing this mini-review only in English means I will leave out huge parts of what makes Transversal such a wonder and whopper to read. Moving fluidly between English, Spanish, Spanglish, and even more, this book uses language as a tool (read: monkey wrench; read: hammer; read: carabineer clip; read: steam engine; read: love). If the place we call New York is an archipelago . . . If one of the worst hurricanes in history shares a name with our grandmother . . . If the weight and worth of the bats under Congress Bridge are immeasurable . . . If a short poem written on a plastic bodega bag is a bagku . . . If what at first appear to be translations tell their own stories . . . If rigidly adhering to received forms allows radical transformation . . . Then this . . . . (University of Arizona Press)

Review published originally with Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/2021/09/ele...

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the poems "Batsonnets" and "Cinquains in Transit".

[Aidan Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite book in a topics in poetry class I’m taking in yet it feels so stylistic that it can’t realistically accomplish its goals. High brow poetry that is meant to convey an important message on the state of Puerto Rico to a wide unknowing audience…how does that work?